Picking out the best the anime music world has to offer!

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First things first, a hearty congratulations to “Kimi no Shiranai Monogatari” for winning it all, beating out such tracks as “Nippon Egao Hyakkei,” “My Soul Your Beats,” and “Platinum Disco.” Questions about whether its victory was really assured will always remain, but seeing that 30% of Omochallenge submissions had “Kimi no Shiranai Monogatari” winning it all and that its point position in the initial seeding outstripped the others by a huge margin, we can safely say it was a heavy favorite going in.

When I announced that I’d be doing a post-mortem, I figured I’d have a huge laundry list of items to go through. And while I do have such a list, it’s not as long as I thought it would be. It’s hard to write a long post-mortem when the tournament execution ran smoothly, when the tournament director had fun with what went down (good-natured grumbling about “Hacking to the Gate” being a part of that), and when the task itself wasn’t thankless (see comments section in the previous post). I’m glad you all had fun and stuck with it to the end.

Things I’ll have to ponder over:

Nominations process – the big question that’ll be on my mind is whether this nominations process worked too well (and should ever be used in the future). The way in which the point allocations were done was very deliberate, and judging from how the results panned out, had a high amount of predictive value. So in terms of its effectiveness, I’m quite pleased and if anyone ever wants to run a nominations process for a popularity contest, this point spread is what I’d recommend using.On the flipside (fripside?), predictability doesn’t make for interesting tournaments. I know I tend to pay more attention to NCAA March Madness or NCAA Football when there are upsets going on week in, week out. And when that happens, there’ll be far more avenues for discussion and punditry as we all try to puzzle out why one underdog managed to beat an established song and what makes a song resonate with more voters than another song.

If I really wanted to make this interesting, I’d just make the first slot be worth a lot of points. Like, a lot more than it’s worth now.

Tournament length – Yes, it may be hard to believe, but the actual tournament proper started the last week of July, and ended in the first week of December. In other words, a little over 3 months to wrap up the voting. If you were to include the prelims (mid-July) or the nominations process (mid-June), then we will have been together for a third of the year. Needless to say, it was long.

For a one-shot deal (as this tourney is meant to be), I don’t see this being a bad thing since the intent was to give 256 songs a reasonable chance to shine. That meant longer first rounds so that people can get familiar with the tunes and from there, hit cruise control and accelerate to the finish. If this tourney was an annual feature (or even biennial), I’d have a harder time justifying its length. As is, I’d like to think the execution was a reasonable balance against all those competing interests.

Marketing – If there’s anywhere where this could be seen as a failure, it would be in getting word of this tourney to spread even farther than it has. The worries I had included violating some forum or messageboard policy or being overly obnoxious that it’d cause a backlash (even if the idea of an anime music tourney should, in theory, curry a huge amount of interest). Still, for a lackluster marketing effort, getting 300+ votes in the finals is a turnout that I’m happy with. The only thing I wonder about is if this could have turned into anything more in terms of participation rates.

That’s about all that I have to say. Feedback is very helpful. Appreciation is always appreciated and, once again, thanks for sticking with this the whole way through. With the tourney over, I can crawl back to my hidey hole that is Anime Instrumentality, conduct more experiments, but mostly just review more CDs. I have been remiss about that.

Oh, and steelbound/nullset: you won the omochallenge. I promised the winner would get Macross Frontier OSTs 1 and 2 and I’ll deliver on that. Let me know your address so I can mail it to you. If you decline your prize, let me know too.

Before we take care of things, Bracket Pedro Polls will close in 24 hours, so get your votes in by then. Once it does, Round 2 will have come to a close.

So with that in mind, polls for Round 3 will open on Monday, October 28. Now that we’ve gone through 2 rounds, the theory is that everyone who has stayed up to date with the tourney thus far has become really familiar with the music. At least, that’s what I’d hope for. Because of that, voting will will move at a much faster pace and polls will only be open for 3 days and will remain that way for the remainder of the tournament. We’ll still be posting 4 polls each day, which means these rounds are going to go by pretty quickly and it behooves you to be even more on top of things than you’ve already been.

And with that bit of serious business over with, I’d like to throw this question out there: What new songs/artists or songs you’ve re-discovered have caught your attention as a result of this tourney? The secondary goal of this tourney is to introduce people to stuff they might not otherwise have heard after all.

For me, not catching up on the Rebuild of Evangelion meant missing out on Utada Hikaru’s work. With this tournament, it means “Sakura Nagashi’s” gotten a chance to worm its way into my consciousness. In terms of rediscoveries, “Mizu no Madoromi” certainly qualifies and it just slipped my mind just how wonderful of a ballad that is. And, finally, who can forget the impact that “Odin” has had upon us all. Might still be the song that’s garnered the most outpouring of praise even if it fell out of the first round!